Charles Murray and America's growing class divide: A Q&A

The conservative scholar Charles Murray provoked a firestorm in 1994 with the release of "The Bell Curve," a book that examined IQ levels and life outcomes of whites and blacks.

He is again provoking rage and praise with his latest book, "Coming Apart," which examines America’s growing class divide. Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, describes an elite that is wealthier and more culturally isolated from mainstream American than ever before.

On the other end of the class divide, he describes a growing segment of the white working class that is in deep trouble — not because of stagnant wages or unemployment, he argues, but rather because of decaying values. He documents a frightening decline of marriage among this group and presents evidence of declining work effort, religious practice and basic honesty.

Q. You describe two classes of Americans that have grown increasingly separate. Let’s explore how that divide today is different than it was 50 years ago. Start with the material divide, things like income, cars and housing.

A. We have now a separation of lifestyle that goes beyond income and gets down to a matter of culture. Let me give an example: In 1960, the most expensive car you could buy was a Cadillac, which went for $45,000 (in today’s money). Compare that to the amount you can spend on a car today and you can see how it’s increased.

But the fascinating thing is that many executives who could easily afford a Cadillac in 1960 didn’t buy one because to do so would be considered showing off. Today, there is no reluctance whatsoever to engage in a lifestyle that is lavish. There’s a real drop-off in the sense of wanting to be one of the guys that prevailed then.

Q. And the neighborhoods where they live?

A. When you look at the elite neighborhoods around New York City like southern Westchester — or wealthy parts of Connecticut and New Jersey — in 1960, the average income was $85,000 in current dollars. That means there was a big mix in those neighborhoods. Only a quarter of the people in elite neighborhoods had college degrees.

Fast forward to 2010 and the same elite neighborhoods have median incomes of $163,000, which is affluent. But more importantly, 67 percent now have college degrees. Finally, to make that more problematic, a great many of the people who run the country grew up themselves in these upper middle-class neighborhoods, so they have never known anything else except this unusual portion of American society with its distinctive culture. That separation, and the ignorance about mainstream America, is to me a major problem.

A. Marriage is the central cultural institution and spills over into everything else. Married men do much better in the labor market, and religiosity is much stronger in married couples. In 1960, nearly everyone was married; you were looking at well over 80 percent of the working class in the prime years of 30 to 49.

By 2010, in the upper-middle class you still had 84 percent married, not much lower than it had been for them in 1960. Whereas in the white working class, only 48 percent were married. That is a remarkable cultural shift within just 50 years.

Q. Is that partly explained by co-habitation?

A. There is more co-habitation, but the problem is that doesn’t help in the most important aspect of marriage — raising children. Social scientists of both liberal and conservative persuasion know that children raised in two-parent families do much better, even after controlling for income and education. Co-habitating parents don’t do any better than unmarried women, so it’s no substitute.

Q. Why is that?

A. Co-habitation is typically very short-term.

Q. You don’t seem to attach much importance to the role of sagging wages. The average wage for male high school graduates has dropped by 23 percent since 1973, as Paul Krugman has pointed out. Doesn’t that mean fewer men are capable of supporting a family?

A. He chose the highest point in 1973. My comparison is to 1960. If you take 1960 and 2010, you are looking at overall wages in the working class that are within a few hundred dollars. In 1960 that enabled a person to get married.

And the best evidence is not statistical; it’s the testimony of people who live in working-class neighborhoods. Talk to the women who are not married and what you hear is that for me to carry these losers would be like bringing another child into the family. We are talking about a cultural shift of a minority of men in white working class areas that is a repudiation of the work ethics that formerly characterized the working class. A second point is that the dropout rate among white males continued in the 1990s. You had low unemployment, plenty of jobs, more of them above the minimum wage, and more men continued to drop out of the labor force.

Q. William Julius Wilson, the sociologist at University of Chicago, found the lack of good jobs in Chicago’s inner city was a key reason for the decline of marriage there. You don’t agree?

A. The timing is nuts in Professor Wilson’s book. You had marriage starting to plummet in the black community in the 1960s, when the labor market was red-hot. We only had labor-market problems after 1973.

Q. You describe evidence that marriages are less happy in working-class families. What role do declining wages play in that?

A. To keep presuming that these families are unable to make as much money as they used to misstates the situation. The income in working-class families is not appreciably lower now than it was in 1960. I think saying people are less happy due to a change of a few hundred dollars of income is stretching it. In my own experience, the amount of money in a family has a low correlation with the likelihood of happiness in marriage.

Q. The book has a fascinating discussion about the role of elite colleges in perpetuating this divide. Tell us about your findings on Harvard University.

A. During the 1950s, the American university system underwent a transformation, especially among elite colleges. Harvard is a good example. It went from a school in which the average incoming student was socially and economically at the top, but academically was just pretty good, to a student body in which just about everyone was at the top academically. Over the course of just 10 years, from 1950 to 1960, the change was so great that the average freshman in 1950 would be in the bottom 10 percent in 1960. The result is that elite colleges gave the most talented a chance to get a good education, no matter what their background. That’s good. The difficulty is they have increasingly monopolized the leading positions in the country. And the socialization in elite colleges foster a different kind of culture. So the isolation of the new upper class has been appreciably increased.

Q. What harm is done when the elites are out of touch with mass culture?

A. A good example is that you have someone who is sitting in a department in Washington regulating the lives of truck drivers and he doesn’t understand the least little bit. You have people making decisions about what they think is good for the rest of the country without having any direct experience. The chances of making a stupid mistake are very much higher.

Q. Describe the class differences you found in religiosity, and its importance.

A. Religious people are more likely to contribute to secular social capital — being active in the PTA, providing neighborly help, serving on fundraising committees and the like — than people who are not religious. So it’s important to know that religiosity has dropped through the floor in white working-class America. Only about one of eight working-class whites ages 30-49 report that they attend church regularly and have a strong affiliation with their faith. That’s half the proportion in upper middle-class America. Secularization has happened everywhere, but it’s hit the working class much harder.

Q. Why did you focus your study on white Americans? And when you compared white Americans to all Americans, what did you find?

A. I limited the book to white Americans as a way of concentrating the reader’s mind. When you talk about social problems, there’s a natural tendency for people to ask themselves if you’re really talking about a problem that is focused in the African-American community or is associated with immigration. By talking exclusively about what’s going on with non-Latino whites, readers can’t use such explanations to distract themselves from the central truth; even among a population that has no excuses, these problems are serious and growing.

Q. What worries you most about your findings?

A. That community life in the white working class will continue to deteriorate, along with life in the working class in the nation as a whole. It’s effectively the end of the America we have always aspired to. We are going to have a very European-style working class.

Q. Meaning what?

A. That they don’t participate much, and that they have to be taken care of by the government.

Q. What’s been most encouraging?

A. The response to the book has been encouraging. I think this may be a set of problems whose time has come.